


The one who will remember everything

by kimabutch (CWoodP)



Series: Sasha's Epilogue [1]
Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Found Family, Gen, canon-typical implications of past child abuse, the major character death is the one in canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-06
Updated: 2020-01-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:55:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22138906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CWoodP/pseuds/kimabutch
Summary: Snapshots from Sasha’s first six months after the fall of Rome. A love letter to Sasha Racket and her soft epilogue.
Series: Sasha's Epilogue [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1676896
Comments: 36
Kudos: 74





	The one who will remember everything

**Author's Note:**

> (Are the historical inaccuracies because RQG is an alternative history or because I’ve forgotten almost everything I learned from three years of high school Latin? Who knows! Except for the lack of slaves, sexism, and homophobia, that’s definitely on purpose.)

The sun has set, risen, and set again by the time that Cicero stops, points to a fancy-looking house on a hill, and says something she can vaguely understand. Sasha barely nods back. Her legs have long since stopped hurting and are now simply numb, and her entire being is working to keep herself upright. 

She doesn’t remember collapsing halfway up the hill, nor Cicero running for help to carry her the rest of the way. 

* * *

Sasha’s gotten used to waking up with a start, ready to fight, but this time, she wakes slowly, becoming gradually conscious of the warm blankets wrapped around her and the sunlight behind her eyelids. It’s only when she starts vaguely listening for the familiar sounds of Hamid’s soft snores and hears birdsong instead that her eyes snap open. She’s lying on a colourful, soft bed in a large room, lit by several windows. Her clothes and shoes are still all on. 

Instinctively, Sasha checks for all her daggers, counting them quickly. All there but the ice dagger, which — she looks down at her hand and the blue scars that jolt like lightning across her skin, and suddenly it all comes back like a punch to the stomach. Letting go of Azu. Grizzop’s limp body in her arms. Corpses, burned alive. 

She closes her eyes and swallows dryly, unsure if she’s holding back puke or sobs, and unwilling to find out. She crawls out of the bed and feels every muscle in her body protest with soreness as she silently walks to the window. By the light of day, no longer wracked by exhaustion, Sasha sees clearly, for the first time, the endless green, rolling fields stretching into the horizon. There’s a weight on Sasha’s chest as she imagines herself standing in them, falling into their infinity, searching desperately for something to hold onto. She tears herself away from the window, her breath short, and leans against the wall, comforted somehow by its solidness. 

Calming her breath and avoiding looking out the windows, Sasha makes her way along the wall to the doorway. Muffled voices come from the lower level, so she creeps down the stairs, instinctually stealthy, and wanders until she finds their source: a garden. From the doorway, she can see Cicero in a new toga, talking boisterously to an elderly man, who’s surprisingly calm in the face of Cicero’s forceful personality. Maybe it’s the effect of several successive potions of tongues that she took yesterday, or maybe it’s whatever allowed Bertie to speak French in Paris, but Sasha finds that she can understand their Latin near-perfectly. 

“For now, you don’t need to worry,” the old man is saying. “The cow and chickens they left and my garden will be perfectly serviceable until Atticus returns.” 

“But you’ve seen her — she’s all skin and bones! She carried me half the way here! She needs something substantial!” Cicero says.

“I assure you, I can take care of her. When she wakes up, I’ll make her a large dinner —”

“Cheers, mate,” Sasha says, coming up behind Cicero, “but I’ve lived on less before. I don’t need anything fancy.” 

Cicero turns around in surprise. “Ah, excellent, you’re awake! Let me introduce you to Aulus, the delightful servant of my good friend, Atticus, in whose villa we are currently residing! Unfortunately, Atticus, his family, and his scribes were traveling in Rome when the destruction occurred, but Aulus will provide for us. I’m sure they will find their way back. They’re not as quick as us!”

“The news of Rome came to us a day before you arrived,” Aulus explains. “The rest of Atticus’s servants fled with most of the animals, but I chose to stay. We have large stores of food here, and many fields. We’ll be comfortable until Atticus returns, at which point we’ll make a decision about where to go.

“Yeah… when he returns… from Rome,” Sasha says, unsure whether it’s morally right to support their naive optimism. She doesn’t know that it’ll be four weeks until Aulus and Cicero give up hope. “How long was I asleep?”

“Two and a half days — you must be hungry,” Aulus says, heading towards the door. “What food do you prefer?” 

“You, uh… you got any eels?”

Cicero beams. “A delicate palate — delightful!”

* * *

That evening, Aulus ushers her into the same second-floor bedroom, and Sasha finds herself lying awake on her back. Whenever she closes her eyes, she sees Hamid, Grizzop, and Azu, swears she can hear them calling her name — but whenever she opens them, she feels her gaze drawn to the window overlooking the fields. At the thought of the open space, her chest tightens. She sees herself walking through them, feels her vulnerability from all sides, knows that she’s being watched. 

She slips out of bed and makes her way to Aulus’s bedroom, awkwardly knocking.

“Is there, like… a basement? A cellar? Just in case we, uh… if someone comes?”

* * *

On the fourth day, she wakes up to Cicero calling down to her from the top of the cellar.

“Aulus heard something in the stables! You’re very strong! I hope you can check!” His voice is as booming as always. Sasha unclenches her hand’s white-knuckled grip on her dagger and pulls herself up from the blankets that Aulus insisted she bring down to sleep on. She climbs up the ladder, Cicero chatting constantly. 

The stables are a hundred metres or so away from the back entrance to the villa, and the path is thankfully shaded by a handful of trees. She sneaks from tree to tree towards the barn. It’s probably bandits, taking advantage of the chaos, like always. Barretts, the lot of them. She isn’t worried. Still, she stays quiet as she eases the door open and slips into a shadow. Listening for a moment, she can hear faint crying from… the ceiling? Fifteen years in Other London allow her eyes to adjust quickly to the dark, and it only takes a moment for her to spot, curled up with what looks to be riding equipment in the loft, a young boy.

He can’t be more than eight or nine years old. His dark black hair is grey with ash, and his tunic is torn and covered in dark patches — probably blood. Tears are leaving streaks down his dirty face.

Sasha freezes, stilling her breath. It’s the classic set up, which Barrett had occasionally used her for when he couldn’t find chubbier-faced kids. The crying child, poorly hidden, surrounded by a well-hidden gang, ready to take out their victim the moment they let their guard down. Works well on Upper London idiots, but not her.

Glancing around the room in the barn, Sasha takes stock of the places that the fuckers might hide, listening closely for any movement. In only a moment, she finds what she's been looking for: several large amphorae in a shadowy area of the room, behind which two or three small people might hide. She sneaks around to them, sure that she's kept herself well-hidden, and in one swift movement, launches an attack on — nothing. Air. Her knife, perfectly aimed to hit a bandit, loudly cracks an amphora, spilling grain out over the floor. Sasha braces for a second, waiting for the bandits that must be hidden somewhere else to start their attack, but all she hears is the sound of a young child who's trying his very best to stay quiet.

Maybe she was wrong.

Sasha climbs up the ladder to the loft, cringing with every creak of old wood. By the time that she peeks her head to the upper level, the boy is staring right at the ladder, holding with both hands a small knife, like you might use to cut tough meat. He points it towards her shakily, and suddenly she's sure that this isn't a set-up — you'd have to be a stupid gang leader to get someone like this as bait.

"Hey mate," she says in Latin. "Don't think you actually want to fight me. Nice knife, though." The boy tries to press even more of his body into the riding equipment, away from her. Without getting closer to him, Sasha swings on the end of the loft, pulling herself up to the ledge and sitting down, legs hanging off the edge. She sits in silence for a moment, suddenly very aware that she has no idea how to interact with small children, even those wielding weapons. What had she liked at that age?

"You wanna see some of mine? Sasha says. "Knives, I mean." Reaching into her studded leather coat, she pulls out a dagger. From the corner of her eye, she sees the boy flinch. "Hey, nah, it's okay, I won't hurt you, see?" she says, and offers it to him, holding it by the blade. He looks at her with confusion, but doesn't take the blade, so she lays it down carefully on the floor of the loft in front of him.

"Now this one," she says, pulling out her adamantine dagger and admiring its intricate patterns, "this one's my favourite. Well... one of my favourites." She lets him look at it from his place among the riding equipment and then, when she's sure he has his eyes on her, weaves it through her fingers so fast that it looks like water. She throws the dagger in the air, making an arch over her head, then a figure eight, then catching it on one finger, where it spins for a moment. When she looks back at the boy, he's transfixed. Sasha can't stop a small smile from coming to her face as she brings out a third and fourth dagger and continues on with her tricks.

Five minutes later, the boy has pulled up right to her side for a closer look at her fire dagger and the way its flames shift as she runs it over her arms, behind her back, through her fingers. He's holding his meat-knife in one hand and her old dagger in his other, but absent-mindedly, no longer on edge.

Putting out the dagger in one final flourish, she turns to the boy. "Do you wanna stay with me here? Just as long as you want, though," she says quickly. "I won't keep you here if you want to leave. But... we've got food, and a couple of... friends."

At "food," the boy perks up immediately. As if suddenly remembering that he's supposed to be cautious, he gives a shy nod.

"'Name's Sasha... Whosaskinus" Sasha says, and it occurs to her that this might be the first time she's given her name unprompted in her life.

The boy hesitates for a moment. "Maximus," he says. "Cause of my little brothers."

Fourteen years later, when Maximus helps a traveling pregnant woman give birth to a child, the boy will be called 'Little Maximus' in honour of him.

* * *

It’s Aulus who insists that Sasha take a bath and wash her clothes. They’ve been there ten days by that point, and Sasha’s yet to venture beyond the stables or the garden. She’s more help to Aulus inside, she says, trading her off-the-cuff Other London recipes for Aulus’s high-brow cooking, learning the names of the plants in the garden, and, at one point, climbing into the barn’s rafters to patch a leak. Aulus isn’t so bad: quick with a joke, less pompous than Cicero, and kind to her in a way that still feels a little foreign. 

He lets her know, gently at first, that they do have heated baths that are quite pleasant, and wouldn’t she like to change from her leather coat into something more comfortable? And Sasha does like baths (despite her grumbling the first time Eldarion made her take one), and she doesn’t like picking bits of Rome dust in her belt or seeing the stain of black blood on her pants — but it feels so final, doesn’t it, taking her stuff off? As if she’s saying that she’s not leaving. And it’s not like Sasha actually has plans to leave or believes that she could really ever find her way back, but every time she takes off her studded leather jacket, she feels herself telling Hamid and Azu and Bi Ming that she’s not coming back for them. 

Eventually, Aulus and Sasha come to complex negotiations, and Sasha agrees to let him wash her other clothes if she can keep the jacket nearby while she’s in the bath, and put it on again right after. She lays out her knives one by one right near the edge of the water, counting them before slipping in. The water is warm, as Aulus promised, and she feels all her muscles relaxing, despite herself. With an ache of nostalgia, she remembers Hamid’s apartment in London, and the bath she took there. It feels like years ago. 

She’s dried off, dressed, and is figuring out how to arrange the daggers in her leather-over-tunic outfit when she sees Maximus’s head poking out from the doorway. He’s lightened up considerably in the past few days, and tends to stick around Sasha like glue. 

“Oi, privacy!” she says, and Maximus’s face falls as he realizes she’s seen him.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to look, I was just going past and —” Maximus comes running up to her and motions for her to lean down. “You’ve got a bird on your back!” he whispers excitedly in her ear. 

“Oh. That’s a scar. This… guy fell on me once and he had lots of bird statues on him.” 

“What? That’s awesome!”

“Yeah, I… guess so,” Sasha says, confused by his enthusiasm. Gesturing to the burn on her neck, she explains, “This one’s from when I set off a lot of bombs by accident. Bombs are like… they make big explosions. You’d like them.” Maximus looks impressed, so Sasha continues, showing him her cold hand, “This is from when my dagger exploded. It was an ice dagger, like my fire dagger but ice, and I was trying to stab a thing but it went wrong.” She pulls down the collar of her tunic slightly to reveal the autopsy scar on her chest. “And this is from when I died and this evil thing took all my bits out but Zolf put them back…” 

“Who’s Zolf?” Maximus asks.

“Oh, he’s, uh… I guess he was a… friend, but he…” Sasha trails off, feeling suddenly untethered. When she sees Maximus staring at her in confusion, she rouses herself. “Go check if Cicero needs help with the cooking, okay? He’s learning, but he’s not good.”

As Maximus scampers off and Sasha finishes placing her daggers, she thinks about how she’s never been good at stories. She can’t make the words come out in the right order and the right time, not like Hamid can. She’s never needed to, not really, when she has her daggers. Can’t hide well if you’re talking all the time. 

Now, though — she’s the only one who knows these stories, for the next thousands of years, maybe ever, Azu and Hamid don’t — no. But no one else can talk about the gargoyles in Paris and Cairo, or the time that they killed that snake-hair woman, or the time that Hamid made her eat at a million restaurants in Prague. It feels wrong for her to be the only one who knows about those things, as if they never happened. 

But it feels wrong, too, for Sasha to talk about her friends. She doesn’t think she could ever find the words for how she felt that day in the pub that Zolf said he was leaving. Or when Azu had told Eldarion to back off, or the sound of Brock laughing wildly at a joke that she knew wasn’t funny, or Grizzop’s face when he saw her again in Rome, or how Bi Ming’s hands moved so expertly over the clocks he repaired, or the shake in Hamid’s voice whenever he was trying not to cry. They’re important, too, but they’re so important that she doesn’t think she could ever tell them right. 

So she won’t, she thinks, as she buttons up her leather jacket. 

* * *

“I’m sorry, you know. About what I said about your friend,” Cicero says as he and Sasha are weeding the garden one day about five weeks after they arrived at the villa. It’s taken almost this long for Cicero and Aulus to admit that Atticus won’t be coming back, and in the meantime, social classes have broken down and Cicero is trying his best to help out around the villa. 

“What?” Sasha says.

Cicero continues, his voice unusually subdued. “Your goblin friend, in Rome. I said that it was his fault. It wasn’t. He was trying to do what’s right, and he protected both of us.”

Sasha pauses, fighting off the urge to run away from this awkward conversation. “It’s well, it’s… alright. He was… yeah, he was good. Yeah.” 

“Still, I understand if you don’t want to stay because of me. I had always meant for us to stay here until Atticus came back and then reevaluate our options. But he hasn’t, and you’re under no obligation to remain.”

“Cheers, mate, glad to know that you’re okay with me being gone,” Sasha says. Cicero starts to protest, but she interrupts him. “Sorry, that was unfair. It means a lot that… it’s okay if I go. But I don’t really have anywhere to go, do I? And… I couldn’t do that to Maximus. I think… I want to be there for people… who need protection.” 

“Oh. That’s good of you,” Cicero says. 

“Yeah, I guess. ‘Swhat people did for me.” Sasha says, and continues pulling weeds.

* * *

Maximus is a smart kid, it turns out. Pretty observant.

Maximus knows that Sasha doesn’t much like being hugged. Knows that if you hug her from behind, she’ll reach for a knife but will stop when she realizes who it is, and if you hug her from the front, she’ll hug you back, but it’ll be all stiff, and sometimes she’ll look like she’s remembering something she won’t say. 

But Vibia and Paulla, four- and seven-year-old sisters who arrived two months after Sasha and Cicero, don’t know that. When Paulla, mid-fight, shouts at Vibia about their parents’ deaths, Vibia runs to Sasha and clings to her tight before Sasha can realize what’s happening. Sasha finds herself awkwardly rubbing Vibia’s back, wondering what she’s supposed to do. She tries to remember a time in her life when it was okay to cry or when she might expect anyone to hold her if she did. She pulls the girl in closer as her eyes start to sting. 

Maximus knows that Sasha doesn’t like going in the fields. She’ll go in the garden and she’ll teach him how to climb the biggest and best trees, swinging from their highest branches with a huge smile on her face, but she’ll never look out from the top at the rolling hills, which are now yellow with the winter. And she’ll almost never walk in the fields, except for that one time that Cicero accidentally let the cow go and Sasha was the quickest to go run after it. She came back from that looking annoyed and mildly sick, and locked herself in the cellar for hours. 

But Vibia and Paulla don’t know about Sasha’s fear. Paulla loves playing in the fields and in the clearings, where she’s drawn the circles in the dirt for a game of ball. She explains that you need at least three people to play the game right, and Vibia is too small and Aulus is too old and Cicero is too stuffy, so she needs Sasha to play with her and Maximus. After weeks of Paulla’s begging and Maximus promising that they can go back inside after just one round, Sasha finally relents, trying to calm her breathing and not look around too much as she lets Paulla drag her by the hand to a clearing right beside a clump of trees. By the time that they’ve been playing for ten minutes, Sasha’s competitiveness has distracted her from the wide fields around them. 

Maximus knows that Sasha will tell stories if he asks, but that she won’t talk much about the other people in the stories and goes quiet when he asks about them. He’s heard about the time that she crossed a great big sea in a little boat during a storm, but never about that guy who pulled her out of the water or why they were on the boat in the first place. He loves the one about the time she snuck into a bunch of buildings with giant monsters guarding them, but he always wants to know more about the person who blew up the main building with magic. Sasha always says she’ll tell him about that guy some other time. Eventually, he stops asking. 

But Vibia and Paulla don’t know about the people Sasha won’t mention. A month after they came to the villa, they’re sitting with Sasha on a couch. Paulla’s at her feet and Vibia’s running her fingers through Sasha’s hair, which she’d allowed Aulus to crop short using one of her knives. Vibia has always been fascinated by the shock of white in Sasha’s hair. 

“You’re a girl, right?” Vibia says. Her sister shoots her a reproachful look, but says nothing. 

“Uh… sure,” Sasha says. “Why?”

“‘Cause of your hair. And cause Max calls you Sasha Whosaskin-US. But if you’re a girl, it should be Whosaskin-A,” Vibia says proudly. From the room next door, Sasha hears Cicero laugh. 

“I dunno what to tell you, mate,” Sasha says. “I just made it up one day.” 

“You can make up your name?” Vibia says in shock, spinning herself down so she’s sitting on Sasha’s lap. “Did you have a different name before?”

“I had… yes. It was someone else’s name, but it wasn’t important. He wasn’t important. My other name is… I guess it’s important.”

“Who was the person who wasn’t —” Vibia starts, but Paulla cuts her off, recognizing the distance in Sasha’s voice.

“Who’s the most important person you know?” Paulla asks, in an attempt to redirect the conversation. 

For a moment, Sasha considers talking about Apophis, but while she’s never asked the kids directly about how they ended up at the villa, she suspects dragons are a sore subject. “I knew this guy. He was a bit of a dick but he wasn’t a bad person, I guess. He sort of… paid me. And watched over me and my… friends. And this one time when I was… very sick, he went up to the most powerful person around and he told him to give over this thing to make me better and he said some… really nice things about me. And the powerful person did give us the thing and I got better. Though the guy, the important guy, he did say some awful things about me being sick, but I think he was mostly just really tired…”

Sasha looks up from her rambling and is surprised to see that Vibia and Paulla are wide-eyed, waiting on her every word. A flush of embarrassment runs through her — as does a feeling of deep relief, as if she’d be waiting for forever to talk about Wilde, to admit how much it meant that he’d cared about her, to bring his memory to this distant place. She hopes that wherever he is, he’s managed to get some rest. 

“Also,” Sasha continues, “one time my friend punched him in the balls.”

* * *

One morning at breakfast, Aulus announces that they need to start preparing the fields for seeding. Sasha is surprised, because it’s as cold as it’s been for the past several months, but Tertia and Fausta nod sagely at Aulus’s decision. They’re a young couple who recently moved into the villa after their home was raided by some of the bandits. The robbers have increased in numbers in the area, but have left the villa alone since a couple of them met the end of Sasha’s knives. Aulus is relieved that Tertia and Fausta are here and can help with the farm, and even though he insists Sasha can stay in the villa, she knows that she should help, too. 

So that’s how Sasha finds herself surrounded on all sides by open fields, dizzied as she stares at the distance between her and the nearest clump of trees, leaning on the rake she’s been using to till. She doesn’t hear Maximus running up behind her and barely registers him asking if she’s okay, or his yells for someone to help. She’s trying to say that she’s alright by the time that Fausta has come to her side. 

“You need to get inside,” Fausta says over Sasha’s protests. “You’re no help like this.” 

“It’s the sun, I’m hot, I don’t need —” Sasha mutters, but Fausta cuts her off. 

“Sasha Whosaskinus, it’s incredibly cold out here. You’re not overheating.” Fausta sees Sasha’s expression, and her voice softens, “It’s okay. There will be other days. You can do a bit every day.”

And that’s what she does, at first working to the fields closest to the villa and the trees and gradually going further and further into the farm. She suspects that Aulus is responsible for getting the kids to swarm around her, keeping her distracted, but she’ll never complain. 

A month later, when they’re watering the fields, Tertia nudges Sasha and directs her gaze towards Cicero, who’s working twenty feet away. He has, for some reason, decided to wear a nice toga even while doing manual labour, and it’s getting helplessly muddied. Cicero is now attempting to stealthily wash off his toga using the water intented for the plants, but, as he keeps dropping the toga, he's just making things much worse. As Sasha doubles over with laughter alongside Tertia, she barely notices the open space between them. 

* * *

It’s a warm day in late spring when Hostus goes missing. He’s a tall, skinny preteen boy whom Sasha found had been stealing their food and sleeping in an unused servant’s room for several days before anyone noticed. In the weeks since Sasha told him that he could stay without sneaking around everywhere, he’s still not quite learned to trust the other residents of the villa: he jumps at the smallest noise, and she once saw him pull a knife on Fausta when she got too close. Sasha feels like a bit of a hypocrite for chiding him. 

After the boy misses both breakfast and lunch and it’s almost time for supper, Sasha searches for Hostus. He’s not in that clump of trees next to the clearing, where Hostus likes to climb and watch them play ball. He’s not in the old servant’s room, where he’d insisted on sleeping even after Aulus invited him to stay closer to everyone else. He’s not trying to scare the chickens in the barn. Sasha is almost ready to admit that Hostus has simply left in the way that she’s told all of the children they can when Sasha hears faint movement from the roof. She kicks herself for forgetting her old favourite place to hide from Eldarion. 

Climbing through the window in the bedroom she’d stayed her first night, Sasha pulls herself up towards the roof a little less quickly than she might have six months ago: the manual labour has made her stronger and she still throws her knives every day, but she’s out of practice scaling buildings. When she reaches the top, it only takes a moment to spot Hostus curled up in a nook of the roof, knees tucked into his chest, looking down at the courtyard below. Neither Sasha nor Hostus speak as she approaches, but when he turns his head towards her, she can see his eyes are puffy and red, but his face is locked in an expression of anger. Sasha silently takes a seat a few feet away from him. Together, they watch the courtyard, where Cicero is unsuccessfully trying to repair a couch whose leg has fallen off.

A thought strikes Sasha as she remembers another rooftop in a far-away place and time, and she roots around on the roof for a pebble. She shows the stone to a confused Hostus before sending it flying at Cicero — it bounces off the top of the head with a satisfying sound. Cicero grabs his head, looking around wildly, not noticing the pair on the roof. Hostus smiles despite himself and accepts the next pebble that Sasha offers him. He’s not so good a shot as her, but together they manage to get five or six good hits in before Cicero starts carefully searching the skyline while making bombastic threats against his attackers, and Sasha and Hostus collapse with giggles on the other side of the roof. 

For a while, they lie there, staring up at the sky. The late-afternoon skies are clear and the air is warm enough for Sasha to have her leather jacket open loosely over her tunic. 

“There was this one time I ran away,” Sasha says, surprising herself with the words coming out of her mouth, “and my friends came looking for me.”

“Must be nice, having friends like that,” Hostus says, and Sasha recognizes from herself the prickly tone, halfway between sarcasm and longing. 

“Yeah, it was. Really was,” she says. 

Hostus, thrown by her sincere response, falls quiet. After a moment, he sighs and sits up. “What were your friends like?” he asks. “Max says you’re good at stories.”

Sasha pulls herself up beside Hostus. From her position on the roof, she can see the endless rolling fields, budding with new growth under a slowly redenning sky. It strikes her that no part of her finds fear in this view anymore. 

“There was Grizzop,” Sasha says, “and he was a goblin, but they weren’t bad like everyone says. He was brave and fast and funny, even when he was trying to be serious. He wanted to use every moment of his life to help people, and he did. I don’t think I got it back then, but… I think I do now. 

“There was Azu. She was so big and she had this magical camel and one time, the time they came looking for me ‘cause I ran away, she got on the camel and put Grizzop on her shoulders and they went around town getting drunk and starting a fight.” Sasha laughs at the memory. “But she was kind. She didn’t always… understand things, she didn’t always know how to help, but she always tried so hard, even when you felt like you didn’t deserve it.

“There was Hamid. He was small, smaller than Grizzop even, and very posh, and he wanted so much to be a hero. He’d done things that hurt others and he wanted to make it better and… sometimes that meant that he was an idiot and hurt himself. He cared so much about things that he’d cry, but… it wasn’t a bad thing. He cared.”

Sasha pauses, trying to find the words. “And there was Zolf. He… he saved me for no reason, when I was running away from people who wanted to hurt me. He always just wanted to protect us. For us to… save ourselves while he died, but we never wanted to leave him. And he said he’d heal me when I got… sick, but then he left and he didn’t. And… I think I was mad at him for a while, ‘cause it hurt? But I reckon… I reckon he was hurting, too, and he needed to find something to heal him. Tell him he could protect himself, too.”

Hostus, who’s been staring at his feet, looks up at Sasha. “Did he ever find it?”

“The thing to heal him? I dunno. I never saw him again after he left. I hope he did.” 

“Me too,” Hostus says quietly. 

In the silence between them, Sasha can hear the sounds of the villa’s family below: Tertia and Fausta gently teasing Cicero about the mysterious pebbles on his head; Vibia helping Aulus prepare dinner; Paulla and Maximus playing knucklebones. 

Sasha smiles and watches the sun set over her home. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! This is the longest fic I’ve ever written by far, and I’m so happy about it. Thanks especially to Babs/nilim for beta-reading. 
> 
> Some notes on the writing/history:  
> \- The title comes from Dar Williams’s “I Am the One Who Will Remember Everything,” which always makes me think about Sasha’s epilogue.  
> \- I'm not sure if there's a Latin equivalent for "mate," but if there's not, Sasha definitely makes one up.  
> \- “Atticus” here is Titus Pomponius Atticus, one of real-life Cicero’s close friends. Shoutout to Caeliat/ofstarstuff for suggesting him (and also to Helen, who gave me another suggestion that I forgot to note down.) All the other characters (excluding Cicero and Sasha, obviously) are original characters that aren’t based on historical figures.  
> \- I just love the idea of Cicero as a weird, incompetent uncle who’s trying to learn to work on a farm, especially given Sasha’s… other uncle.  
> \- “Big” Maximus was named as such to explain why “Little” Maximus might have that name, given that (I think) “Maximus” was usually given to the oldest child.  
> \- I’ve been to the Italian countryside exactly once and I have no idea what I’m talking about in terms of geography, agriculture, or seasons. However, most of this fic was written while I was on vacation in Portugal, looking at rolling countryside, so that’s something?  
> \- I’m very claustrophobic (to the point of getting nauseous when people talk about the Catacombs episodes), so it was difficult trying to write agoraphobia. I hope it’s okay — I’m open to suggestions about how to improve.  
> \- Eels were, in fact, an Ancient Roman delicacy. Someone in the discord also suggested that Sasha would teach people to make eel keesh, and I strongly agree.  
> \- As someone who works with kids, I feel obliged tell you not to give young children daggers or encourage them to throw rocks at people.  
> \- Paulla’s ball game and knucklebones are real Ancient Roman games! I imagine Sasha gets very, very competitive at them.  
> \- Maybe I headcanon Sasha as a nonbinary woman… who’s askin’?


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